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States of Poetry 2016

The ABR Podcast 

Released every Thursday, the ABR podcast features our finest reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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Neil Thomas

The red thread: Xi Jinping’s ideology of power

by Neil Thomas

This week on The ABR Podcast, Neil Thomas reviews On Xi Jinping: How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism is shaping China and the world by Kevin Rudd. Thomas explains that even China watchers find it hard to be clear on the thoughts and plans of the leader of the Chinese Communist Party. They disagree, he tells us, on basic, critical questions, such as for how long Xi will rule. ‘Enter Kevin Rudd’, Thomas writes. ‘In his latest book, former prime minister Kevin Rudd adds a worthy new chapter to his life of public service, digesting thousands of pages of “Xi Jinping Thought” so that you do not have to’. Neil Thomas is a Fellow on Chinese Politics at Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis in Washington DC. Here is Neil Thomas with 'The red thread: Xi Jinping's ideology of power' by Neil Thomas, published in the December issue of ABR.

 

Recent episodes:


Woman in Bath

 after Brett Whiteley’s Woman in Bath (1964)

 

There was fog on the windows,
inside and out.
She wound her hair into a bun
and eased into the shallow water.
I stood in the doorway, squinting.
                  &n ...

Reply from the Women of Tangier

 

after Brett Whiteley’s The Majestic Hotel, Tangier (1967)

 

So secretly together do we wear
our separateness, we’re so complete
he gives us the white stare.

Easy to see decay and disrepair
in the spittle and hashish-ruined streets.
But secretly together we all wear

our ...

Green Mountain (Fiji)

 

after Brett Whiteley’s The Green Mountain (Fiji) (1969)

 

The skyward pitch of the hill in its green glory
rising heavy and indolent as the knee of a woman
sunbathing in a sarong,
and the thigh that leads from this knee,
an emerald downswelling syncline,
end where the womb’s elasti ...

Window

 

What is the mind that would invent the lock?
What are the pathways of the brain
that must be followed with no ball of string
to arrive at a device
which excludes? Why would you start?

If this slab of the earth
was where you had always been,
there would be no entry point,
no threshold of distrust, only the base
a ...

Waking

 

Note the passive voice in that last line,
the denial implied. ‘People were shipped out.’
The agent with a conscious brain linked
to a hand with a pen or a gun felt his own grip
all along the neural pathways.

Some noises we can sleep through
but even the softest can be an alarm.
Sailboats in the calmest water are still not ...

Theft

 

The maps that teased my childhood were silent.
The imagination they cosseted
was of no use. Instead of song
there was a flatness, a sheet of pastel shades.
I could find Peru, but not food.

And these maps were my inheritance.
Maps can be owned. Land is something else.
Maps can be stolen. When the atlas claps shut
those who ...

On the Mountain

 

Here where clouds soothe rocks, high above commerce,
I could catalogue the sharper images
of evil but to what use? City tabloids
and browsers will unroll bandages
enough to wrap communal wounds.

The bardic robe sits ill. The mist suggests
the insubstantiality of wish.
Summon a future like some old romantic,
some ...

Attack

 

And it is the act, the will
channeled through fibre to impact;
this is history as king hit.
Imagine your own bedroom as nullius,
adding extra dizziness to any fall.

If pain, as is said, cannot be remembered,
only the having been hurt,
then where does the pain belong
that comes out of the blue ocean
into a v ...

kangaroo grass

 

ramayana puppet
                     angled, spare

you gesture with sharp fingers
                    beckoning insistent

eloqu ...

Adrian Caesar was born and educated in England, but has lived and worked in Australia for more than thirty years. ... (read more)